Mute Vol. 1 No. 27

George Orwell's novel 1984 has had a good innings over the last few years: in addition to the runaway success of Endemol's Big Brother format and Reality TV in general, our current affairs are now dominated by a vocabulary that appears to come straight out of the more sinister pages of the book. As if in readiness for last year's centenary of the author's birth, evocatively named governmental agencies, catchy think tank and policy memes and global military campaigns have ensured that the fictional Ministry of Truth has been granted yet another lease of life in fact. The strategic mission of Orwell's Newspeak was the total colonisation of language and the imagination. But beyond the grandstanding of self-consciously political forms of language, unknown power lies in the cracks, whose furtive path betroths us to the dull yet brilliant magic of the everyday.

Includes:

Luciana Parisi on Abstract Sex

Simon Ford on the advent of computer art archiving projects

The University of Openness' Faculty of Cartography unravel the potentials of the Semantic Web

Hari Kunzru on Amy Balkin's guerilla conceptual art work

JJ King on Openness

Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite on America's strategic use of bilateralism

Harry Potter on the Wikipedia

Sebastian Olma on Peter Lynds' theory of time

Peter Suchin on Mark Aerial Waller

Goldie on Whitehouse

Ruth Maclennan on television and science

Betti Marenko & Miriam Swain on sci-art

Artists' projects by Eyal Weizman, Dani Bauer, Anselm Franke and Rafi Segal, Emma Hedditch, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Ron Silliman

Lavish Full Colour Illustrated